DevWeek is the UK's biggest independent conference for .NET developers. This year delegates can have the "inside" take on Microsoft technologies as well the "indie" one.

The MSDN UK team blog has announced details of the Microsoft Tech.Days track that is part of next month's DevWeek 2012 to be held at London's Barbican Conference Centre.

This year's event is DevWeek's 15th and it's the first time Microsoft has presented sessions.

The main DevWeek conference opens on Tuesday March 27 with a keynote about Windows 8, Metro and WinRT presented by independent expert Dave Wheeler.

If you then want to hear more on the same topic from Microsoft experts you can follow up after coffee with Windows 8 for modern application developers from Mike Taulty and Andrew Spooner.

After lunch the two sessions in Microsoft's Track 9 are on "Metro syle applications" in C#. First Martin Beeby looks at how applications take advantage of the capabilities of the different devices from slates to PCs that will run Windows 8. The day's final session, presented by Mike Ormond, looks at Windows 8 cloud capabilities via Live ID.

On each of Wednesday March 28 and Thursday March 29 there are four sessions in Track 9. If you are intrigued by The secret life of a Windows Phone application Mike Ormond will reveal it. Those interested in Windows Azure can here Steve Plank on this topic. If you want to get up to speed with Visual Studio 11 or Team Foundation Service you can attend sessions by Richard Erwin and Giles Davies and the track concludes with a session on Metro design concepts for developers from Dave Crawford.

One of the aspects of DevWeek that delegates like is that they don't have to choose which conference sessions to attend in advance - so you can mix and match topics according to your

Microsoft isn't supplying the only speakers on these topics. If you want an introduction to developing cloud application Matt Milner has a pre-conference workshop on Windows Azure. David Starr from Pluralsight is providing a tour through Visual Studio 11 as the first session in Track 1 of the main conference. There are sessions on C# 5 from Andrew Clymer, on Workflow 4.5 and WCF 4.5 from Richard Blewett and on WPF 4.5 from Dave Wheeler; Robert Boedigheimer looks at new features of ASP.NET in Visual Studio 11 and Brian Randell looks at what's new in Team Foundation Studio

For Windows 8 early-adopters there are sessions on WinRT and Metro during the main conference from Dave Wheeler and he also has a full day pre-conference workshop on Metro..

If you don't want to be quite so cutting edge there are plenty of other topics - Agile, HTML5, SharePoint 2010, Entity Framework, Unit Testing to name just five, and an entire track is given over to SQL Server. Of course, you don't have to decide in advance - one of the aspects that delegates like about the DevWeek conference is that you don't have to stick to a single track and can mix and match sessions.

Book before March 2 for a discount of £100 on a 5-day Universal Pass covering the main conference plus both pre-conference and post-conference workshops. You can also save on bookings for the 3-day conference and for the 1-day workshops.

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